Obama Redistributes Health Not Just Wealth

The Nov. 23 New York Times reported that redistribution has become the unmentionable word at the Obama White House. Former Chief of Staff William Daley says that redistribution is “a loaded word that c0njures up all sorts of unfairness in people’s minds.” He notes that it is a word that in the political world, you “just don’t use.”

But the newspaper goes on to note that “the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the Obamacare law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall.”

The Times, as usual, missed the point. It is not the redistribution of wealth that is the main problem. It is the redistribution of health that bothers us most of all. Money is one thing. Our health and lives are quite another.

By restricting access to certain doctors, hospitals and therapies, Obamacare limits our access to health. There are forty drugs that address specific types of cancer genetically. The average Obamacare policy covers ten of them. If you have one of the others, you are out of luck.

By cutting reimbursement rates to doctors and encouraging their early retirement, Obamacare dumbs down health care so everybody gets a little, but nobody gets a lot and many don’t get enough. Even with issues of life and death at stake, Obamacare limits our options.

We cannot go to Sloan Kettering or the Mayo Clinic or Cedars-Sinai if we have cancer. It’s not covered. Nor can we count on ever seeing an oncologist. Very few will accept the low reimbursement rates offered by the system.

A heart patient will rarely get to see a cardiovascular specialist and someone suffering from colon disease will rarely get to see a gastroenterologist. The reimbursement rates are prohibitively low for these specialists. And, if you go out of network, you have to pay the full freight yourself, including any follow-up therapies.

A top New Jersey orthopedist called into my radio show and said that there was no one in south Jersey in any of the Obamacare plans who was capable of performing complex spinal surgery.

Obamacare redistributes wealth by charging those whose policies have been cancelled a premium to cover the uninsured. And it charges a 40 percent premium tax on those with good policies. And it charges a fee of $63 a head for group plans. All this money goes for the poor and uninsured.

But it is not the redistribution of wealth that is the key point. It is the redistribution of health that none of us can afford.

Over the last 30 years, thanks to trickle up voodoo economics, wealth has been distributed UPWARDS to the richest people in the US, and they have banked it, or they have taken that money and invested it overseas, pulling it OUT of the US economy.

The class war has been fought and the wealthy people, the supposed “job creators,” won.

“People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences.” -From the book “SuperFreakonomics”